altivo

Here are two terminals connected to the Digital Personal Work Station 433au, an Alpha processor based system now running OpenVMS 8.3. On the cluttered radio desk you can see the VT220 operator's console at the right, and a programmer's Xwindows station at left. (Click thumbnail for larger view.)

I suppose to many this might seem silly, reviving old hardware that can't run modern games or even Windows. (Well, actually it can run Windows... NT 4.0 that is. I have it set up to boot that as well as Debian Linux and OpenVMS, but OpenVMS was the environment I particularly wanted.)

This might seem like an expensive toy, but as it happens, I have relatively little invested in it. The Alpha itself was rescued from the scrap heap, a discarded test server from our now dismantled former library consortium. I've invested about $70 in the VT220 terminal, which wasn't really essential but I wanted the feel of the early 80s when I first encountered VMS. The other monitor and keyboard were old spares on hand here at the house. Oh, and I had to add an SVGA graphics card to the workstation itself, at a cost of about $20. The latter took a lot of hunting and trial and error, because graphics cards compatible with VMS are fairly scarce today. The OpenVMS software licenses are free to hobbyists for non-commercial uses. The distribution media kit for the operating system, utilities, and language compilers cost about $30. OpenVMS runs only on VAX, Alpha, or Itanium/IA64 hardware, though you can get decent freeware emulators for the VAX or Alpha that will run on Intel style systems.

While VMS was originally designed as a multiuser, multitasking minicomputer environment with batch processing queues and time sharing terminals rather like a small version of the then traditional IBM mainframe, it gradually evolved into both network server (databases and eventually web servers) and high end user workstations. The character cell terminal can run development environments for more than a dozen computer languages, including C, C++, Python, Perl, PHP, Cobol, Basic, and FORTRAN. It also supports databases such as MySQL. The graphical terminal is very similar to a Linux or UNIX workstation, and has GUI editors and modern tools like web browsers (based on Mozilla/Netscape code, but not Firefox) and photo/image editors. The 64 bit Alpha EV56 RISC processor offers performance at 433MHz that rivals a Pentium III at 1GHz or higher and generates less heat. Back in May I was benchmarking this Alpha against Intel and IBM mainframe platforms, and it came out on top both in terms of mathematical precision and dynamic range, and in terms of sheer mathematical speed. RISC processors can be amazing when you have good code to run on them,

This particular machine has a built in sound card and USB ports, and I hope to use it for ham radio applications. Running Linux, it already has a wide range of tools available for it, from soundcard digital transceiving (RTTY, PSK, Packet, AMTOR, etc.) to engineering programs to model electronic circuits or antenna performance. Some similar software is available for the VMS operating system, but not as much. I'm planning to "exercise my mind" by porting or writing additional amateur radio applications for OpenVMS.

If you look closely at the photo, you will see the history of the PDP, VAX, and Alpha computer lines in the logos on the equipment. The VT220 has the old DEC logo, the X station keyboard and mouse bear the Compaq logo, and on the graphics monitor you can just make out the Hewlett-Packard logo upper left. DEC was bought up by Compaq early in the millennium, and Compaq was gobbled up by Hewlett-Packard not long after that. This Alpha system bears a |d|i|g|i|t|a|l| nameplate, but the Alphaserver DS10 I have at the library wears the red COMPAQ insignia. Hewlett-Packard now markets Itanium servers that can run either OpenVMS or 64-bit UNIX, the same options DEC originally offered for the Alpha line.